Is anyone using an HD-PVR with an Echo successfully? I've seen some people complaining about choppy playback, although that was a while ago. I don't know if any of the recent firmware updates fixed that. I have an HD-PVR, but its hooked up to my Sage server (and I'm not going to take it down to test it with my WMC server).
The HD-PVR works pretty well with my SageTV setup,but I kind it a little finicky. You need to have a set top box and an HD-PVR for however many simultaneous recordings you want to be able to do. Then you need to control the set top box automatically so that it changes channels on the STB when a recording starts, typically through IR blasting. The HD-PVR comes with an IR blaster, but you can only use on in your computer. So, if you want to control two STBs for two HD-PVRs, you need to come up with some other method for controlling the second STB. You can generally get it to work OK, but you'll run into problems every now and then. Sometimes it might mistune a channel, although that's perhaps less frequent than you might expect. I have more problems with the STB going to sleep, and then I'll have a handful of recordings the next day with just a black screen. There are typically ways to mitigate that problem, although I don't know of any foolproof ways.
Plus, that assumes the Echo is fixed to work with HD-PVR recordings.
Anyways, based on what the Echo can do today, I don't see much of a reason to go with an WMC+Echo system over a DishNetworks Hopper system. A big advantage for the Echo should have been being able to play back ripped content, but in reality the Echo doesn't appear much better at playing back ripped content than the Hopper boxes are.
